A data and distribution flywheel around search that AI answer engines are now attacking at the business-model level.
| Dimension | MOATE | Community |
|---|---|---|
| Switching costsweight 15Consumers leave search in one click; Workspace and Cloud are stickier but a minority of profit. | 5 | — |
| Network effectsweight 15Search quality improves with queries; YouTube and Android are two-sided markets in their own right. | 8 | — |
| Scale & cost advantageweight 12Index, infrastructure, and custom TPUs at a scale only two or three companies can match. | 9 | — |
| Brand & pricing powerweight 12A verb. Ad auctions extract pricing power without ever setting a price. | 8 | — |
| Cornered resourceweight 12The index, the YouTube library, Android, Chrome, and decades of behavioral data. | 8 | — |
| Distribution controlweight 12Chrome and Android make Google the default on most of the world screens; the iPhone default is rented from Apple and under remedy. | 9 | — |
| Disruption resilienceweight 12AI answers threaten the ten-blue-links economics directly; Google is both the defender and a leading attacker. | 5 | — |
| Independenceweight 10The most antitrust-exposed company on the list: search and ad-tech remedies, plus dependence on the Apple default deal. | 4 | — |
The four biggest tech companies plan to spend about $725 billion on AI this year, and even they can't pay for it out of pocket. Amazon is moving chips off its balance sheet, Alphabet is selling stock and Meta is renting its own data centers back from investors. Who can afford the war says more about their moats than the spending does.
Anthropic's leaked IPO filing shows the fastest revenue ramp in software history. OpenAI is nearing $70 billion a year. We re-scored both moats against the numbers. Revenue went up. One moat went down.
The AI labs cut their prices in the same week. Amazon gave away the software that runs their models, on every cloud. The brains are getting cheap, and Amazon wants to own the body.
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